Here is my final set of notes from the conference of the Association of Classical Christian Schools. Here are links to day one and day two.
No conference photo from today either, but another teacher gave me a ride back to Michigan in his COOL CAR.
(Leg room not included in deal.) And then, I’m just going to share notes from one talk.
Andrew Kern: How to Overcome the Barbarians We Have Become
Whatever the talk might officially be about, my experience has been that when you hear an Andrew Kern talk, you really get stream-of-consciousness Andrew Kern… and that’s not a bad thing. My favorite part of his talk was an illustration at the end, so I’m actually going to share that first. Although he did not state it this way, it reminded me of the idea that many evils follow from our failure to recognize “substance” today.
I could be wrong about this [he says], but I think that even a frog will be something we cannot ever perfectly understand. We have to begin with and appreciate the mystery.
Post-Enlightenment, we think the only way to understand anything is to cut it up and look at its pieces. Tell a child you’re going to give him a puppy, and then give him a box of dissected puppy parts. You know what you’re missing there? The puppy.
You’re missing the radiance of the glory of the puppy that will lick the child in the face.
Today we teach students to dissect a puppy, but never encounter the radiance of a puppy.
A child will not care about the elements of a thing until he has first experienced the radiance of a thing.
Show them the universe as a gift from God.
So I quite appreciated that. The application to teaching science is obvious, but it isn’t just about that. You could analyze the *pieces* of a poem and never actually appreciate the poem. You could dissect sentences and never appreciate the literature. And so on.
I have to connect this to an Anthony Esolen tweet from last night also.
OK, you can go find the book list if you want to, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters here is that good science teachers need to have it always on their minds these days to avoid giving students the impression that men are just machines. It would be so easy, using modern textbooks and methods, to give that impression even just accidentally (I preach this also to myself). You have to consciously and, from time to time, probably verbally and explicitly tell them that isn’t what a man is.
More scattered notes
OK, but now abbreviated (and more scattered than usual, sorry) notes on the rest of Kern’s talk. The overarching theme of the talk was that he sees deliberation as the mark of civilization. Everything valuable in civilized life comes from deliberation. Deliberating is a faculty God has given us, part of Christ’s image in us.
We overcome the barbarians we have become by recognizing a few things.
Civilization depends on using deliberation instead of force and violence.
Deliberation needs a form, a constitution, a time, a place, rules.
The US Constitution is such a form. Robert’s Rules of Order are such a form.
You also need a spirit of deliberation.
This spirit requires three things:
Good faith.
Sound judgment.
Forgiveness.
We need, when we deliberate, to avoid bifurcated thinking.
We need to maintain our sense of proportion.
That sense of proportion is really what enables sound judgment.
Historically, what led to the development of the quadrivium was the desire to cultivate a sense of proportion.
We help people perceive the way things properly fit together, which helps them find not just the practical, but the beautiful.
Our English word “proportion” is from a Latin word that basically means putting out what belongs there.
But the Greek word is analogia, and that might be even more helpful.
The fundamental habit of mind we need to develop is an analogical habit.
The human mind likes to run to either “oneness” or “manyness” thinking. An analogical habit of mind helps us avoid both extremes.
[Bit of an aside.] I think the modern age is really at war with the Trinity, particularly as the Trinity is manifested in the family.
It is already there in the garden. Adam is a father. The text tells us that he has a son in his image. The mother proceeds from Adam’s side, and functions as an advocate and counselor.
You think men and women are the same? If a two-year-old falls down and scrapes her knee, which parent picks her up and comforts her? (Audience: the mother!) The mother! And what does the father say? (Audience: Walk it off!) And which does the child need in that moment? BOTH!
The temple is the explanation of everything.
Possibly with the exception of things made by humans, everything that exists, exists because God spoke it into being. So in a sense, everything is a word of God.
So when you are getting to know anything as it is, you are getting to know a word of God.
Scripture says God is light. We experience some of his radiance, but just as physics teaches us, there is a lot of light out there that we cannot see.
God has been kind to us by giving us, on Earth, representations of heavenly things. The tabernacle in the Old Testament was built after the pattern of the temple in Heaven. I could be wrong about this, but I think God actually took Moses into the heavenly temple, just as Isaiah was taken there later.
[Aside that I liked.] When we speak to each other, my vocal cords cause the air to vibrate, and then those vibrations travel, eventually reaching your own ear drum and setting up a vibration there. We communicate, soul to soul, physically. You should pause a moment and think about how amazing that is.
[And then the story about the frog and the puppy.]
We lost the glories of civilization during WWI and WWII. We kept many of the ornaments, but we lost the essential.